The Families of the World series, which has garnered a large number of awards, offers an introduction to various countries through visual images, daily activities, and narration by a girl and a boy in the age-range of the target audience - elementary through middle school. Daily activities of the narrators, the economic situation of their families, the social fabric of their communities, the activities of school life and recreation, and the gathering and preparation of food effectively convey the message that the world is really just peopled by 'kids like us.'

Through this predictable formula, the series can easily lend itself to comparative social studies, especially with the online teacher's guide containing a compendium of economic and societal data. The images provide a rich understanding of how people live and dress in their ordinary lives. The narrators are a 12-year old boy named Khim, who is in the first year of high school, and a 7-year old girl named Shahani, who is in middle school. Khim lives with his grandparents in a coastal village on the island of Cebu, and Shahani lives with her parents and a younger sister in a market town in Bulacan on the island of Luzon, 50 km north of Manila.

Khim attends a school with ten thousand other students, tends to the family's small goat herd, gathers wood for the fire in the outdoor kitchen, and is responsible for starting the rice for dinner each day. On his walk home from school each day he stops at an arcade to watch youtube videos. Shahani is also in a large school - five-thousand. She and her younger sister take dance lessons taught by her father, who also works on weekends as a children's entertainer at a Manila area mall. Both of the children subtly demonstrate the efficiencies of their family's lifestyles within their own environments. For example, Khim pointedly comments that the bamboo-slat floors of the home allow sand to drop through and air to circulate. Khim also demonstrates that the chickens, goats, and family garden plots contribute to self-sufficiency.   

If you say "Tibet," the next word that comes to mind will probably be "Buddhism."  This is all the more likely as by far the most famous Tibetan is the Dalai Lama, the charismatic Nobel Peace Prize laureate (1989) who for decades has traveled all over the world to spread his message of compassion and individual responsibility to statesmen as well as countless ordinary men and women.

Yet - and this may come as a surprise to many - not all Tibetans are Buddhist, even aside from the tiny Muslim and Christian minorities inside Tibet.  Many Tibetans are followers of a religious tradition known by its Tibetan name "Bön," which is found especially in the eastern and northeastern parts of Tibet, i. e. in areas lying outside the so-called Tibet Autonomous Region, but within the historical and cultural borders of the Tibetan nation. 

It is a belief shared by all Tibetans that Bön was a flourishing religion in Tibet, especially at the royal court, at the time when Buddhism was introduced in the 7th and 8th centuries CE.  As opposed to Buddhist Tibetans, however, the followers of Bön (known as Bönpos) claim that Bön rather than Buddhism is the universal, true, and most effective path to spiritual enlightenment.  Furthermore, they maintain that the founder of Bön, Tönpa Shenrap ("The Teacher Shenrap"), was the ruler of a kingdom to the west of Tibet, and that he lived long before the Buddha appeared in India.  Hence Bönpos, in spite of sharing a common culture and way of life with other Tibetans, including a well-established tradition of monastic life, regard themselves as representatives of a distinct religion, and this is how by other Tibetans regard them as well.

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When peace is negotiated in 2006 and the Maoists enter the political process, Silu is elected to the new Constituent Assembly.  Now we see her as an increasingly confident and articulate politician, returning at last to her native village to be reunited with her parents and childhood friends.

Throughout it all, Silu frames her decision to join the revolution in terms of her aspiration to improve the condition of women in her country.  We hear of a galvanizing tragedy from her childhood: the suicide of her older sister, who had been married off at twelve and mistreated by her in-laws, only to return home and hang herself in despair.

The film opens with scenes of women sweeping and winnowing rice.  In a voiceover, we hear Silu: "They used to say that when the rooster crowed, the hen could only listen.  They used to say that when the women pick up guns, they won't work."  Silu was attracted to the Maoists by their egalitarian ideology and their rejection of traditional class and gender disparities.  40% of the Maoist combatants were women, and she was proud to wear the uniform and fight alongside the men.  

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